Depending on the federal state, citizens have to spend a different proportion of their income on electricity and gas. This emerges from calculations by the comparison portal Check24, which are available to the German Press Agency.

The average electricity and gas costs of a single-person household (annual consumption: 1,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and 5,000 kilowatt hours of gas) were compared based on the average per capita purchasing power of the respective federal state.

Accordingly, such a model household in Hamburg must spend 4.3 percent of its disposable income on energy. At the other end are consumers in Thuringia, for whom electricity and gas costs account for 6.0 percent.

Average: 4.9 percent of income for energy

“On average across the country, a single household spends 4.9 percent of its income on energy,” notes Check24. Other energy sources were not taken into account in the calculations. At the beginning of the year, the market research institute GfK assumed that Germans would have an average of 27,848 euros per capita available for consumer spending, housing, leisure or savings in 2024.

In Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the shares for electricity and gas are 5.6 percent. This is followed by Saarland (5.4), Bremen (5.3), Rhineland-Palatinate (5.2), North Rhine-Westphalia (5.1 percent) and Schleswig-Holstein and Brandenburg (both 5.0). The shares are below average in Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony (both 4.8), Hesse (4.6), Berlin (4.5) and Bavaria (4.4).

Check24 justified the fact that consumers in some eastern German states have to spend a larger part of their disposable income on energy costs with lower purchasing power. On the other hand, the regional network usage fees are higher. "These costs are distributed among fewer consumers in the eastern federal states, which means that end customer prices are higher here than in the west."